


The First Step of Surviving is Knowing How Hard it Is

by MK_Yujji



Series: A Study in Surviving [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-16
Updated: 2013-03-16
Packaged: 2017-12-05 11:19:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/722690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MK_Yujji/pseuds/MK_Yujji
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John hadn't realized just how much his life had wrapped itself around Sherlock until it was unraveling around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The First Step of Surviving is Knowing How Hard it Is

**Author's Note:**

> Title subject to change as the series progresses.

At first, the shock gives John a nice medical cushion to soften the blow. Everything is a hazy set of snapshots that don’t make any sense and don’t seem to ever go together properly. 

A lifeless wrist clutched in his hand.

A reporter with a bloody nose.

Greg’s hand on his shoulder in sympathy.

Donavan’s vindication and pity.

Mrs. Hudson making tea.

A sea of people standing outside a graveyard, gawking like they had any right to be there.

Ella telling him to say it out loud.

 _Sherlock Holmes… my best friend… is dead_.

Even then, it isn’t real, it doesn’t sink in, until he’s standing over a grave, begging for a miracle that never comes.

That’s when the shock slips away and reality starts to take its place.

He’s not sure if it’s better or worse when Mycroft comes to him with soft words of snipers and Moriarty’s body on the rooftop of Bart’s. He isn’t a Holmes, but he doesn’t need it spelled out any further than that.

It doesn’t really matter, one way or the other, in the end.

Sherlock is still dead and John is alone again.

Life after Sherlock is colorless. John’s days lose all sense of vitality.

There is no posh baritone, no flapping coat, no manic energy.

There is only John, haunting London, more of a ghost than Sherlock could ever be, dead or alive.

Every night, he sits in solitude and cleans his pistol. He takes it apart with careful efficiency. He polishes away nonexistent dust on each piece.

Then he puts it all back together and just holds it for long minutes as he separates the pros and cons of his life versus his hypothetical death.

_Harry is sober, has been for almost six months. He doesn’t want to be the one that makes her backslide. Mrs. Hudson would be upset to get the news… possibly Greg as well. Anderson and Donavan absolutely don’t deserve to stand over his corpse and be **right** about Sherlock Holmes being the death of John Watson._

He counts the bullets in his ammunition clip, but never actually loads it back into the gun. No sense in leaning the scales one way or the other when he’s weighing decisions. 

In a lot of ways, it resembles those dark days before Sherlock. When he’d been invalided back home to London and told he’d never be a surgeon again, told he’d never be useful again.

John has always tried to avoid self-delusion. He’s seen Harry take that route, seen his parents. He knows what lies down _that_ road.

And because he strives to be self-aware and honest, he knows exactly how close he was to putting a bullet through his brain the day he ran into Mike Stamford.

A week at most. Probably closer to another day or two.

He’s a soldier at heart, probably more than he’s ever been a doctor, even, and he’s always done what a soldier does - soldiers on. Through death and violence and blood and desert and rain…. Through whatever life or fate has sat in his way.

But even soldiers have their limits and he’d been at his when fate had decided to toss a mad genius in his path.

In a lot of ways, his life is back exactly where it was.

Except in all the ways it’s a thousand times worse.

_Everything is grey, dull and dank in a way that leaves him cold. Everything requires more effort than it’s worth. John Watson is worse than a no one that nobody needs, he’s that poor bloke that the madman broke. Sherlock is **gone**._

The scales always tip precariously on that point.

 _Sherlock had judged John’s life as more valuable than his own_.

John isn’t sure he’ll ever forgive Sherlock for that, but the gun always goes back into its box, unfired.

~*~*~

Every night is a conscious decision to wake up the next day.

Maybe that’s why he’s so surprised when his subconscious pulls the rug out from under him.

He’s wandering the streets of London without a destination in mind. The small bedsit he moves into after his sense of home went and jumped off a roof is just as oppressive as the one he’d had _before_ , just as blank and as dull and as unwelcoming, though John isn’t sure he’s being entirely fair. _Everything_ is blank and dull and unwelcoming, so it’s not anything particularly wrong with the bedsit itself. 

He hasn’t been back to 221B Baker Street except to retrieve the bare necessities, hasn’t been able to stomach it. Mrs. Hudson hasn’t insisted that he clear out the flat, but he knows it isn’t fair to her that he keeps putting it off.

The very idea of going to their flat, of walking up those steps and seeing the boxed remnants of his life with… The very idea makes bile well up in the back of his throat.

So he doesn’t.

Jobless, unwilling to stand staying in, unable to venture to more familiar avenues, John wanders. It’s aimless, it’s pointless, it’s the only thing he can do.

It happens two weeks after the funeral, three weeks after Sherlock said goodbye.

One moment he’s lost in a blank haze, the next Greg Lestrade is crouched beside him, asking him what he thinks he’s doing.

He isn’t sure what, if anything, he’s thinking and all he can do is stare at the other man.

There is chaos around them and it takes another minute for John to realize that it’s because of _him_. A pair of cars are up on the sidewalk, another is overturned in the middle of the street.

No one, miraculously, is hurt, not even the driver of the overturned car, but he knows that it was just luck.

It takes most of the night to convince Greg that he hadn’t stepped into traffic on purpose, not consciously, but he’s shaken because he’s seen this before. He’s known plenty of soldiers with nothing left to lose who throw themselves into every dangerous situation that comes along.

He’s never been one to tell another man how to live or die, but he’s always had a special level of disgust for those that involved others in their suicidal tendencies.

He never expected to understand them, to _empathize_.

Apparently, making a conscious decision to live isn’t enough sometimes.


End file.
